At an absorbing informal meeting of a dozen people at a faculty/graduate-student reading group on poetry yesterday, we talked about a half dozen different topics that came up from our reading of two poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and different translations of those poems by Langston Hughes and Achy Obejas, and also about an essay by English poet Dick Davis about how English poetry can be seen as a sequence of changes brought about by translation into English of poetry from outside England, from Chaucer to Ezra Pound (Davis does not specifically address American poetry in his essay). Our poet colleague Mary Kinzie wondered if the loss of pronounced word-endings in English after Chaucer’s time was an important reason why rhyme declined; I said that I thought that the decline of rhyme in English was a result of poets (in different periods) having narrowly defined rhyme as full rhyme rather than, as in some other languages and literary histories, regarding it as a broader range of kinds of phonetic repetitions, including many that are not full rhyme.

In other words, even though poets like to say that English is rhyme-poor compared to inflected languages with lots of frequently repeated word-endings, I was arguing that the abandonment of rhyme (several times, and most widespread during the twentieth century) was based on literary choice rather than on any linguistic limitations of the sounds of English. (And in fact, the poets of ancient Greek and Latin, which are very inflected languages, chose not to use rhyme, while later, medieval, poets writing in Latin did so.)

This may sound like an arcane discussion that is of little interest to readers of poetry, and yet it points to how our understanding of poetry itself is not “natural” but rather the result of historical choices, of the influence of poets and critics whose dominant opinions may have less to do with the truth value of what they say than with the particular advantage in their own historical moment of looking at poetry one way instead of another. So most readers of poetry and most American poets, might feel that rhyming is not “natural,” but the truth it that it is no less natural than not rhyming. Meanwhile readers who are less in touch with what twentieth-century poets have done–like listeners who have heard few works by twentieth-century composers–may yearn for poetry with rhyme simply because much the poetry they learned as schoolchildren was from the nineteenth century, when a lot of poetry rhymed, and when classical music conformed to a paradigm of harmony that was superseded by twentieth-century music (to various degrees, agreeable or not to one listener or another, depending on the composer).

It’s not hard to demonstrate that any particular poetic quality or element is not “natural” in the sense that it is inherent in poetry itself. Just as we all begin to learn from birth how to sort out which phonemes of our mother-tongue(s) we need to pay attention to, and begin to stop paying attention to the others and in fact eventually lose the ability to hear those others, so poets learn to pay attention to which elements and resources of poetry they need to pay attention to in order to write what is regarded in their historical moment and their culture as poetry (several sorts of poetry, usually), and stop paying attention to other elements and resources, and in fact may eventually lose the ability even to notice how those other ones work. Or at least may convince themselves that those other ones are of no great importance. And thus we gets “schools,” movements, exclusions, dominance, and so on. All of which in fact makes poetry richer overall as a practice of meaning-making, because the multiplicity of poetry frees poets of different persuasions to extend the capacities of poetry in different directions.

But no one should think that learning how to write a poem or read one is as “natural” as learning one’s mother tongue(s). This is so, even though there are poetic practices still in use that are amazingly old—as old as the earliest traces we can find of what poetry was, even long before there was writing. Any poetic practice that old, even if it is not “natural,” must be a response to an appetite in the human mind for certain things that language did then, and still does now. Language as a vehicle, a capacity, an appetite, for thought and feeling, I should say.

“Language use” (as distinguished from “language”) is a choice of some words and communicative elements and quite naturally a suppression of others–for reasons of clarity, or at least for the effectiveness or efficiency of the communication, no matter how much remains ambiguous, as it always does, in all of our talking and writing. In what we say and write, we give each other recognition, even amid hostile interaction, as belonging to the same language-using group, as sharing certain communicative codes of everyday life–street slang, beauty salon lexicons, business buzz words and office talk, football fan language, hip-hop rhymes, academic manners and terms of discourse, politically coded terms and tactics of talk, vocabularies of medicine and conventions of therapeutic speech, etc.

Although there are counter-examples against what I am about to say, nevertheless there’s still use in the old thesis that poetry is a kind of language-use that especially “turns” language–by tropes, syntactic surprises or deviations from the expected word order, use of sound, use of particular kinds of words, etc., in such a way that what would have been suppressed or repressed or rejected or overlooked is actively brought into play, instead. There are lots of different kinds of “figures” that do these things—figures that we use all the time in everyday speech, but which we notice much more in poetry, for the reason that poetry is the space within which we are invited to use them more.  (Poetry, we might say, is the invitation to use language that is more “turned” for various reasons–to give a special kind of emphasis and power to what is said.)

Repetitions of sound, various uses of the line and stanza, a playing with the forms and roots of words to create repetitions and puns, and other devices are among the ways in which language in a poem says to the reader: “Hey! I’m a poem!” All these devices are, to put this simplistically, like the dogs in the old Far Side cartoon whose barking has been decoded, at last, by a mad scientist’s device that shows that every barking dog up and down a street is saying the same thing as the mad scientist passes by on foot while wearing his scientific headphones: “Hey!” “Hey!” “Hey!”  The great difference between poetic devices–tropes–and the cartoon dogs, though, is that “Hey!” is only the first of several things that each device is typically saying. (And in fact, those who own dogs–and cats–know that they too have real vocabularies, and say different things at different times.)

What is brought into play (extra, unanticipated meaning) makes one feel that the usual suppression or repression or prohibition or control of certain words, of the expression of certain ideas, thoughts, feelings, has been lessened or even defeated. What was not yet said, or not said often, is finally said—at least in part–even if only provisionally, for lack of our being able to say almost anything definitively. This is a mark of poetry.

So whether by means semantic, syntactic or structural, an effect of fresh saying (so the poet hopes, so the reader hopes) is created—often by means of an associative or intuitive process rather than a logical one (or, OK, a logical process: that too is possible, and usually is ornamented or made rhythmical, or both, in a way that logical argument is not usually expected to be). Perhaps a repeated sound links together a pair of lines or thoughts that are related in other ways, too; or binds together two lines otherwise so unrelated as to seem to fly apart (such rhyming of apparently disparate utterances began to be used conspicuously in the nineteenth century in European languages, but it was probably always there, in poetry; there’s also something like this, as I understand, in the ghazal in Urdu and other languages; and I have been told that such rhyming is not at all uncommon in Russian).  Thus something (extra meaning, the meaning with which the language has now been charged) is created and communicated at the same time that the feeling of avoiding the expected is conveyed.  (What’s usually expected is a suppression or repression or rejection or sheer play for the sake of getting the words right in a wrong way, so to speak. And who would want a surgeon to play with words in an ambiguous way while calling for an instrument, or an attorney, while in court, or a soldier, while at war?  Poetry isn’t everything; it’s just something inherent as a possibility in language, something that permits a movement of thought, feeling, spirit, that otherwise is not possible.

Play, emotional and intellectual power, pleasure, and freedom or liberation from the expected–these are four of the many aspects of what happens to or with language in poetry. One implication of these four would be that stricture or laboring (two different opposites of “play”); passivity, vagueness or weakness of expression (opposites of “power”); dullness, unpleasantness, clumsiness, lack of precision, and maybe even pain (opposites of “pleasure”); and constraint or manipulation of thought and feeling or a perceived threat against thinking or feeling (opposites of freedom and liberation) might characterize some (not all) non-poetic language. At least, these opposites reveal what is not so often found in good poetry. I don’t think this is a matter of taste, or of different aesthetics. In its own terms, according to its own customary practices, over the last 5,000 years and more, perhaps all or most good poetry embodies these values. In contemporary poetic practice in many cultures, anything at all can be named, signified, described, portrayed, evoked, or imitated. What I’m trying to get at is the manner in which poetry uses language, no matter what the words mean semantically or how they point to things referentially.

Now, I do not mean to imply that non-poetic language is necessarily unpleasant because it must lack these poetic aspects; in prose, too, in our time, everything is permitted. In a writer like Samuel Beckett the prose is thick with poetic devices.  It’s rather that the positives in my first list are what I think poetry makes possible to the greatest degree, in our language use.

Since language use, especially in poetry, is always leaving traces of choice, suppressed or repressed alternatives, etc., poetry always has always gotten to the slipperiness and contradictoriness of language before scholars and critics and literary theorists, and poetry in fact even invites them to do what they do when they analyze; and even invites them, I think, to chastise the poet or the poetry for not saying what they want to hear.

Poetry does not hide from clarity in obscurity, or hide from obscurity either; it just keeps proliferating meanings, even in its clearest, plainest statements, and it keeps proliferating structures of meaning, that make use of poetry’s possibilities of saying several things at once.  So poetry is always adding meaning to itself anyway–usually in a pleasurable way, for those who get pleasure from such language use–and poetry often identifies for the close reader even (or especially) what the author did not consciously know he or she was doing, however deliberately he or she did it unconsciously. (It’s important to realize that this revealed unconscious content is not only personal and psychological, but also social, cultural, political.) Also, poetry tends to use all the many functions of language, not only and not necessarily mainly the representative or referential function (“signifier” and “signified”).

So in addition to naming things, poetry reproduces, in varying degrees and proportions, other things we do with language that don’t depend entirely on the meanings of words: being with someone, showing others that one is present and who one is, controlling other people with words, pleading or praying to divinities, and more. Here’s one convenient sorting of these functions into seven categories (different analysts of language functions come up with different schemes), quoted from Catherine Garvey, Children’s Talk (1984):

The linguist Michael Halliday observed his young son during the period when his vocalizations were assuming consistent phonological form and when he began to exhibit clearly an intention to communicate by means of these forms. Halliday was able to distinguish seven different functions, or uses, of his son’s talk, which he took to be models of the child’s conception of what talk is for. The first notion to emerge is that of talk as instrumental, a means of satisfying wants or needs. Another function is regulatory: the child discovers that others seek to control him by talking and that he can also control the behavior of others. The child also senses that one can establish and maintain contact with others by talking; he recognizes the interactional function. The child also expresses his individuality in talking; he asserts himself and his own sense of agency, for talking is a field of action in which he can make choices and take some responsibility. Thus talking has a personal function, as well. The heuristic, or learning, function, is exemplified in the perennial questions “why?” and “what’s that?”; the child finds that he can use talk to learn about and describe his world. And talking serves the imaginative function of pretend, which may overlap with an aesthetic function (although Halliday does not dwell on this possibility) as the child realizes that he can create images and pleasurable effects by talking. Finally, the perhaps the latest use of talk to appear, is the representational function, or talking to inform. Adults, when they think about language, regard it as a means of expressing propositions or as a means of conveying information. They view this as the primary function of talk, but it is hardly the dominant use for the child.

Mt. Kitheronas, late August 2009 (Petros Giannakouris-AP)

I was startled to see on the front page of the Washington Post web site yesterday, among photos of the wildfires burning near Athens, one that shows a nighttime silhouette of fire along the ridgeline of Mount Kithairon, as it was called in ancient Greek.  Here’s the caption:

“A fire burns on the mount of Kitheronas about 70 kilometers, (45 miles) west of Athens on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009. More than 90 wildfires have ignited since Saturday across Greece, and six major fires were burning late Sunday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) (Petros Giannakouris – AP”

Greek poetry thought with many methods, devices, artistic strategies, most of which poetry still uses, but one of them that we can’t access in the same way was thinking with a landscape in which many different values had already been inscribed by both myths and history.

Among the villages that have burned in these recent fires is Marathon, site of the famous battle between Athenians and invading Persians in the year 490 BCE–from which, according to legend, a runner was dispatched all the way to Athens to announce the improbable victory of the Greeks over a much larger force of their enemies.  Another village that has burned is Plataea–also the site of a decisive military victory, after the Persians, about a decade later, invaded once again.

While the surviving poetry of the ancient Greeks makes much less of such events than does the work of ancient historians, Persians, by Aeschylus, the oldest surviving Athenian tragedy, made dramatic-poetic use of the relatively recent Greek victories over the hated and dangerous Persians by reversing perspectives and portraying not noble Athenian warriors and commanders but instead defeated and pitiable Persian royalty.  This got Aeschylus into some trouble in Athens.

The battle sites were names so saturated with historical significance that not only the name (like Shiloh, Bull Run) but also, in a comparatively compact cultural region, the landscape itself kept signifying, for a very long while.  On the other hand, Kithairon, like some other natural sites, signified ideas that had been collectively created and elaborated within Greek mythology that associated mountain heights with the divine, with the sheer and gigantic force of nature–the antithesis of culture, thus of cities, laws, art, and armies.  So in Euripides’ Bakkhai (Bacchae) the place and name of Mt. Kithairon are used poetically to suggest a powerful pole of human experience that associates human violence (such as catching wild animals with bare hands and tearing them apart and eating their flesh raw) with natural force that can overwhelm everyday human force; that revives within civilized, settled human beings seemingly mythical, pre-civilized values and behavior (such as women roaming together in wilderness and wearing loose clothes held together at the shoulder not by little cords but by little live snakes) and mythical plenty (such as an easy, natural abundance, requiring no work, of water and honey and milk).

All that, too, is burning on Mt. Kithairon.  But it will not be consumed by fires.

Self Within Self

On a page of a small cheap notebook orphaned by his death, the American fiction writer William Goyen (1915-1983) wrote:

1. Writing is waiting (for)
2. Finding the Voice.
Hearing the Voice.  Story is told to me,  I tell it to you.
Otherwise I don’t write–or can’t write.

Within the writer, another speaks–and says what we may not have expected, or may not have even wished to say.  Or what we expected not to want to say.  You must write what nobody wants to hear, Grace Paley used to say to fellow writers.  One of the most important keys to the doors of writing is that one must find a way to free oneself to write, to have written, already, what one had not entirely wished to say beforehand.  In the writing practice of H駘鈩e Cixous, an unforeseen, unanticipated and apparently mistaken articulation is the unpredicted and invaluable entrance to imaginative freedom.  In what way?  In that we can sometimes see in such apparent accidents or supposed slips the same readiness of the unconscious, the intuition, that is, the full imagination, to bring to conscious awareness something that we are ready to perceive and to acknowledge and, as writers, to use.

In the American writer William Maxwell’s last novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), the author-narrator (Maxwell’s very explicit blurring of a distinction between the two is part of this novel’s strength) describes a moment in his boyhood when, after having moved from a small town in Illinois to Chicago, he saw, or thought he saw, to his surprise, in the crowded hallway of his new high school, a boy he had once known–to whom he did not speak as they passed each other, because the author-narrator’s pained knowledge of the other boy’s tragic childhood in that same small town inhibited him from offering a greeting.  Instead, as he feels it decades later, he snubbed the other boy.

The reader meditating on this passage may feel that the author-narrator snubs the other boy because by the other boy the author-narrator is unconsciously reminded of his own continuing grief over the death of his mother during his childhood.  To keep from feeling his own pain, he refuses to empathize with that of the other boy.  But artistically I find it more productive to think of this moment the other way around–because of living in the aftermath of his own grief, ever present but unacknowledged, the author-narrator is unable, among his welter of impressions in the school hallway, not to see a boy who is or who resembles someone he knew elsewhere.  He sees that boy because the two of them are in one way the same (their grief) even though they are also completely different.  In the emotional structure of the novel, the other boy is a metonym for the author-narrator’s own feelings.  The author-narrator already is unconsciously seeking a vision of the other boy, and finds it, or is called by it.

So it happens that unconsciously we call for certain texts to call us.  We are read, as we read, by those texts that enable us to read what we are now prepared to read but have not yet read (even if we have read it before).  And we are written, sometimes with the effect of falsifying ourselves, but at other times with the effect of liberating ourselves–by language, by other texts, by our own effort to produce an authentic widening of our experience–to articulate “a truth won from life against all odds, because a truth in and about a mode of experience to which the mind is normally closed,” as the English poet Donald Davie once put it.

This process is not merely self-reflexive, which would become self-oppressive and is in any case insufficient to consciousness; the process also brings to our awareness our unconscious understanding of words and the world, of self and of our past selves, and this allows us to change our understanding.

As I write, what follows my sense of myself is my sense of my not-self and of my after-self, as the impulse to write is followed by the writing–there, on the paper, on the desk, outside of me.

The productive effect of the writer’s differentiation from himself or herself, the writer’s self-alienation, I myself first understood in a social sense, when reading Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams.  These writers could not address in their writings the communities of those whose experience they shared and on whom they drew for the substance of their work, because those communities were cut off from–respectively–literacy, in the case of the American slaves, whose way of life Douglass had escaped; poetic innovation and mastery, to say nothing of highly unconventional metaphysical daring and God-doubting in the case of Dickinson’s backwater Amherst (and, as it turned out, sophisticated Boston as well); and again literacy, both literal and cultural, in the case of the immigrant families whom Williams treated as a physician, and about whom he wrote out of his intense responsiveness to their experience (see his poem “Complaint,” published in 1921, and his well-known story, “The Use of Force,” collected in 1950 but originally published earlier–and I do not forget his remarkable In the American Grain, but I have no space at present in which to try to put this thinking into relationship with Williams’s sense of how we Americans have been formed in a grain that is distinct from that of the European colonizers of this continent).  Douglass’s eloquent sentences include the famous juxtaposition of a symbol of the slave’s deprivation and suffering with a symbol of the literate man’s opportunity and obligation to write of the slave: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”   Dickinson’s poetico-theological challenges can still affright conventional belief.  None of these three wrote in order to please, yet each of them might well have wanted very much to please a community to which they could not write, a community of their own that would not understand what they were saying.

After I came to recognize the paradox of these writers’ having been separated from their own communities by their very purposes and practices of writing about, and on behalf of, but not to, and even against the grain of, those communities, I realized that Rimbaud’s formulation of poetic liberation, “je est un autre” ["I" is an other], might be not only a given or sought-for psychological state but equally a state socially produced in the writer, and in fact a valuable effect both psychological and social of the very act of writing.  (William Goyen used this famous motto of Rimbaud as one of the epigraphs to his novel The House of Breath [1950], where it has the effect of alerting the reader in advance to the multiplicity of selves who narrate the book, all of them also in some sense the author-narrator “Goyen.”)  The act and result of writing place something that was inside oneself outside oneself, since writing is not at all a wholly internal process, even when a poet composes in his mind before recording the poem, but an act that produces this something that then exists outside the writer.  “Writing” does not necessarily exist at all inside oneself beforehand.  Helene Cixous says, “This is how I write: as if the secret that is in me were before me” (Rootprints, 67).

Among other reasons, writing is disruptive because paradoxically it is a release from, yet also an intrusion on, the non-writing or preliterate part of ourselves.  Writing may solace many of those who write and read, but at times it also disturbs those who do, a disturbance that is itself an energy carrying the writer into the work.  Trauma again.  Perhaps writing often disturbs those who do not write and read, for whom the act of writing seems to be a falsification of the potential veracity of the living voice.  This belief is without foundation, but it is understandable.  I recall being insistently ordered to tell orally “in my own words” what was already in my own words but written down and lying unread on the table, when I stood before a draft board in Houston during the war in Viet Nam.  The three members of that draft board were disturbed not only by what I had written in order to make certain ethical claims, but also by the fact that I had written it.

I am reminded by this of a scene in Patrick White’s historical novel Voss (1957), in which he portrays doomed European early explorers of the Australian interior.  (But we are not doomed when exploring our own interior, even if we sometimes cannot help, complicated creatures that we are, sometimes feeling that our old selves are doomed, either because we cannot discover how to change them and escape being ruled by them, or because we do discover how.)  At a moment when the expedition led by Voss has passed the point of return, Patrick White’s explorers write letters that they think may be their last, they entrust the letters to their sole aboriginal guide, an old man whom they call by the name Dugald, and they send him back toward the now very distant white settlements to deliver them.  Wandering without haste, half-clothed in European garb that is a metonym for western culture, Dugald encounters a group of fellow aborigines.  They notice the flash of white in the pocket of his ragged European coat, and they want to see the letters:

One young woman, of flashing teeth, had come very close, and was tasting a fragment of sealing-wax.  She shrieked, and spat it out.

With great dignity and some sadness, Dugald broke the remaining seals, and shook out the papers until the black writing was exposed.  There were some who were disappointed to see but the pictures of fern roots.  A warrior hit the paper with his spear.  People were growing impatient and annoyed, as they waited for the old man to tell.

These papers contained the thoughts of which the whites wished to be rid, explained the traveller, by inspiration: the sad thoughts, the bad, the thoughts that were too heavy, or in any way hurtful.  These came out through the white man’s writing-stick, down upon the paper, and were sent away.

Away, away, the crowd began to menace and call.

The old man folded the papers.  With the solemnity of one who has interpreted a mystery, he tore them into little pieces.

How they fluttered.

The women were screaming, and escaping from the white man’s bad thoughts.

Some of the men were laughing.

Only Dugald was sad and still, as the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.

In this little parable of oral culture versus writing culture, White portrays the exteriorizing of thought and feeling in the act of writing.  “Bad” thoughts come out in writing and are sent away; “good” ones do, too, we might add.  We western readers see that this is true, in a somewhat but not wholly mistaken way.

So because it is partly the unconscious content of individual psyche and shared language, personal feelings and learned attitudes that is there, “alienated” onto the page, one reads text not only with the eyes but, as White vividly illustrates, with one’s whole culture, one’s whole web of beliefs, even (and especially) with one’s tongue (in both senses).  The young woman tastes the sealing wax, which is the mark of the privacy of the written letter, the interiority of it, the authenticity of it.

As Cixous puts it, one reads with “the body.  The entrails.  Of the soul also” (Rootprints, 90).  (Neuroscientists like Anthony Damasio have established the great degree to which the body as well as the mind produces feeling and thinking, and consciousness itself; ancient writers beginning with Homer characterized all thinking and feeling as located in the body in ways that neuroscience, and post-Enlightenment thinkers like Cixous, now prove and theorize–not in order to negate reason, but in order to attend to the full capacity of reason.)  Cixous writes with the body, longhand; she cannot achieve her “interior voyage” with a machine; writing longhand, “it is as if I were writing on the inside of myself” (Rootprints, 105).   For her, one emblem of this act is Stendhal’s secret childhood writing on the inner waistband of his trousers (Rootprints, 103).

So from one’s own belly, from one’s emotional entrails, one foretells one’s own past feelings and thinking.  The written page is the waistband around one’s life.  One must work to foretell not only the distant past but also the very moment before writing the words one is now reading.  One reads with one’s entrails the entrails that, unlike those of a sheep or a cock, are one’s own and did not require one’s dying in order to be produced.  Or maybe this foretelling of one’s own past being (that is, this act of writing), did require one’s death.  Let’s remember Wordsworth’s poem!

Cixous says, “The relationship to death is fundamental.  It’s the cause.  We live, we start writing from death.”  (By “we” in this particular statement she means herself and Jacques Derrida, her close friend.)  “But: for me, death is past.  It has already taken place.  My own.  It was at the beginning” (Rootprints, 82).  In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous sends writers first of all to what she calls “The School of the Dead.”  If we want to write at all truthfully–

(I hope you will forgive me if I use the word “truth.”  The moment I say “truth” I expect people to ask: “What is truth?”  “Does truth exist?”  Let us imagine that it exists.  The word exists, therefore the feeling exists.) (Three Steps, 36)

–we must at least “try to unlie” (Three Steps, 36).  And “writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth” (Three Steps, 37).  But to try to tell it, we try to see and to write as if we were not ourselves.  We stand apart.  Apart from others: “Between the writer and his or her family the question is always one of departing while remaining present, of being absent while in full presence, of escaping, of abandon” (Three Steps, 21).  (Here’s another sort of “de-famili-arization”–which is not unrelated to the linguistic kind.)  Again I think of William Goyen, who seems to me to have been one of the greatest American practitioners of “ecriture feminine”; in an interview that he gave in 1982, the year before he died, to a French literary magazine, Masques, he said:

Despite their disapproval [meaning, of his parents], I applied myself to writing in order to liberate myself. [...]  I was close enough to my family, but also very alone.  I didn’t understand anything about the pursuits and interests of children my own age.  What they did didn’t appeal to me.  I was alone and remained alone, with one wish: to leave.  I would remain sitting in a corner for hours.  This would greatly annoy my friends.  It was always like this.  Next, I set myself to using anything that allowed me some form of escape (sex, pills, alcohol, etc.).  And now, regardless of where I find myself (at a concert, a restaurant . . .), I always sit where it will be possible for me to leave, because in my head, it is possible that I’ll be inclined to do just that. (Goyen, n.p.)

Perhaps this readiness to depart is a commonplace among writers of a certain temperament.  But if it is indeed an idea, a stance, a possibility, that the writer can use, it remains not very often used.  There is a broader sense of it in the French aphorism of Samuel Beckett that Goyen liked to quote–”L’artiste qui joue son etre est de nulle part. Il n’a pas de pays. Et il n’a pas de frere.” As Goyen himself paraphrased it: “The artist who uses his life completely, throws it full into the tide, is of no place.  And he has no country, he has no kin.”  And this, from a writer who was utterly grounded in, fascinated by, a captive of, local place–both culturally and linguistically–in his portrayal of small-town East Texas in the first half of the twentieth century.  The aphorism is not only about that; it is also about the second sort of standing apart existentially–from ourselves and others.

That is, from our own experience.  We go back to what we lived as if someone else had mowed that field.  The aphorism is about a moment when one can achieve a psychological, not a mortal, dying to oneself and to those whom one both loves and hates, or at least an absence from them, if one is to write a certain kind of truth about oneself and about others, about the world.  Cixous says: “Writing is first of all a departure.”  (But–this departure does not mean that the writer as a person must exist outside any human community.  Poetry and community–a topic for another time.)

Earlier self is other

Our being, as it was at an earlier time in life, especially childhood, can seem like another self who has died but whom we feel is somehow still alive; or is a self whose live presence we think we feel inside ourselves, even though we know that she or he is chronologically dead.  I think the first person who has left a record of such a feeling in poetry is William Wordsworth, in his early poem “There Was a Boy,” which he published originally in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800).  A few years later Wordsworth used this poem in a different way, including it with slight alterations in Book 5 of the second version of his long poem, The Prelude (1805).  The first published version reads as follows:

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye Cliffs
And Islands of Winander!  many a time,                         [Winander=lake Windermere]
At evening, when the stars had just begun                    ["earliest stars began" in 1815]
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake,
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Press’d closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.  And they would shout
Across the wat’ry vale and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled, a wild scene
Of mirth and jocund din!  And, when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven receiv’d
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,
The vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangs
Upon a slope above the village school;
And there along that bank where I have pass’d
At evening, I believe, that near his grave
A full half-hour together have I stood,
Mute–for he died when he was ten years old.

We do not look to such a poem for rapid movement; in the blank verse of this poem and The Prelude, Wordsworth is rather slow-paced and relaxed in his delivery, despite the intensity of his feeling.  He writes without narrative urgency, as if he had all the time in the world, but he does sometimes achieve sudden and striking motion on a larger scale.  The moment he describes in this poem is most notable not for the accuracy of its detail or the vividness of its imagery, but for its presentation of a psychological movement.

And in fact Wordsworth’s goal in describing this moment was explained to us by his friend (for a while) Thomas de Quincey; it was to capture a kind of psychological phenomenon that Wordsworth may have noticed in advance of any other thinker.  In Wordsworth’s words, as reported by De Quincey: “I have remarked from my earliest days that if, under any circumstances, the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances.”

De Quincey reports that Wordsworth gave him two examples–the first, from a midnight walk in the Lake Country when Wordsworth knelt and put his ear to the ground to try to hear whether, beyond their sight, the wagon bringing mail might be approaching; he gave up and only then he noticed a bright star that “fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.”  The second example, Wordsworth drew from the poem I have quoted above.  Reading De Quincey we recover some of the freshness of what was apparently a new metaphor in Wordsworth’s lines, one that we no longer perceive as fresh; De Quincey (mis)quotes the poem and then comments upon it as follows.  When the boy stops listening for the owls,

then, at that instant, the scene actually before him, the visible scene, would enter unawares, “With all its solemn imagery.”  This complex scenery was–what?

Was carried far into his heart
With all its pomp, and that uncertain heav’n received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

This very expression, “far,” by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human heart, and to its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation.

I think it’s worth noting that Wordsworth feminizes the receptivity of the boy by making it analogous to the receptivity of the lake to the light of the stars; the lake is subtly feminine simply because it is a body of water (with many unconscious associations with the feminine established through centuries of art, literature, and thought).  The boy’s sudden perception, in the moment of release from his concentration on listening for owls, of the sound of water and of the scene around him, including the reflection of the stars in the still waters of the lake, ends with this latter image, and so does this main portion of the poem.

Turning then in another direction, Wordsworth intervenes in the first person to describe the boy’s birthplace and, surprisingly, his grave, noting that “he died when he was ten years old.”

In the version of this poem that Wordsworth used in this (the thirteen-book) version of The Prelude (5.389-422),  the last section is slightly different.  Wordsworth announces the boy’s death immediately after the image of the star-reflecting lake, and emphasizes this boy’s isolation from other children.

This boy was taken from his mates, and died
In childhood ere he was full ten years old.
Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,
The vale where he was born.  The churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village school,
And there, along that bank, when I have passed
At evening, I believe that oftentimes
A full half-hour together I have stood
Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies.

We cannot help feeling that Wordsworth regards the dead boy as a spirit akin to his own, especially since the village school he mentions near the end was his own childhood school, and since in The Prelude he spends so much time recounting his own childhood responsiveness to nature–an education apart from and deeper than the education he received in schools.  So to me the most interesting thing about this poem is that in fact it was drafted by Wordsworth in an uncertain mixture of third- and first-person narration.

That is, it was himself as a boy whom Wordsworth originally presented in this poem, a boy who cleverly imitated the calls of owls and eagerly listened for their reply and into whom the natural scene penetrated, producing in him a kind of mystical experience of nature.  First-person lines in Wordsworth’s manuscript notebooks include line 13, “Responsive to my call with tremulous sobs”; line 17, “That pauses of deep silence mock’d my skill”; and line 22, “Would enter unawares into my mind.”  Wordsworth commented in later life, “Written in Germany, 1799.  This is an extract from the Poem on my own poetical education.”

That Wordsworth would recast his own experience in the third person does not seem as unusual as his way of seeing himself as either a now dead, half-imagined, half-real childhood companion of himself, or as himself, truly, as he once was, but now dead to himself.  Wordsworth the writer is another person, not the boy.  In fact, Wordsworth’s rewriting of line 3 for an edition in 1815 seems, in this light, to be an almost wistful suppressed (”unconscious” we would now say) echo of an idea now expunged from the poem, repressed–that he in his own childhood was one of the “earliest stars,” and can now only be seen from afar.

There’s another sign of Wordsworth’s attempt to grasp this uncanny feeling about himself, this uncanny aspect of our being, in the way that in the three different versions of this poem, the boy is given three different ages.  In the first version he is ten years old.  In the second version (1805) he is not yet a “full ten years old”–that is, he is nine.  In the last version of The Prelude, published in 1850, Wordsworth again changed the last stanza in several small ways, one of them being the age of the child.  Here he dies “ere he was full twelve years old”–that is, he is eleven.  If the story were based on some other boy, real or imagined, then tinkering with the age of the boy would seem superfluous; but we know that Wordsworth is thinking of himself here as another person, a child who is alien to himself the adult.  That is, Wordsworth seems to be groping for a sense of exactly when the psychic death of the boy occurred–and this would of course be a very difficult thing to pin down in anyone, perhaps above all in oneself.  In 1850, Wordsworth also deletes the woods and calls the churchyard “grassy”–as if to suggest a certain openness of the space around the grave of his child-self.   (And in this meditation in several sections, I have earlier meditated a little on the grass that is mowed, that is a “math.”)

By far the most interesting poem here is an imaginary composite that we ourselves can construct, in which we can see the daring of Wordsworth’s deep poetic logic.  In this composite poem, the poet describes his own experience in the first person, in lines 1-25, then sees himself as a dead boy whom he describes in the third person, in lines 26-32.  That is, Wordsworth uses poetry as the site of a psychological experiment, seeing his earlier self as an other, presenting the idea that the boy’s responsiveness to nature died, although the boy grew into a man who then sought for that responsiveness in himself again and again, perhaps willing within the poem what he could not experience in life.

The boy is dead; Wordsworth knows himself as that boy, still alive; or the boy is still alive in the man, yet Wordsworth knows that in some deep sense he is dead; his responsiveness to nature is now inaccessible to the man.  It would be 75 years later and in another language, the language par excellence of modern European rationality (Descartes) and yet of feeling, too (Rousseau), that the French poet Arthur Rimbaud completed this thought and explicitly stated that the self is multiple and implied that writing inherently, unavoidably alienates the writer from himself or herself in a way that may shock the self but is also very productive.

Unconscious Deliberateness (part 2)

Writing anything at all is a sweeping oversimplification of our inner life and of the complexities of the world outside us, yet it is also the making of an object.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau described thinking in this way: “[Ideas] comes when they please, not when it suits me.  Either they do not come at all, or they come in a swarm, overwhelming me with their strength and their numbers.  Ten volumes a day [of my journals] would not have been enough.  How could I have time to write them?”   The pell-mell helter-skelter of thought can never be grasped adequately by the conscious mind, much less represented in written form, not even in the most freely associative stream-of-consciousness fiction, because writing must reveal itself in the dimensions of time and language, while thought achieves many simultaneities and a rapid succession of thoughts and feelings that are not even fully articulated, much less organized in such a way as to be communicated to anyone else.

“We’re too unconsciously productive to ever be able to fully grasp ourselves,” as the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas puts it (my italics).  How still are the plans and projects and categories and analysis of the intellect, compared to the pitching and running of the whole mind!  Consciousness is one rider on all the racing horses of the unconscious; when we must analyze words and events and defend ourselves against the manipulation of our feelings by others, it is consciousness that guides us; and when we must seek in our own being that which really matters to us, it is the unconscious that holds the lamp.  Yet consciousness is often insufficient to these tasks.  Hence our need to learn, from parents, and the best teachers, and all mentors official and unofficial, how to analyze, how to reason, how to sort out what is real and true and how to make decisions in the midst of our reactions to rushing circumstances, conflicting loyalties, deliberate lying and spinning, and all kinds of crisis.

So our experience of writing is twofold–the hope of expressing something that will satisfy our impulse to speak what is true to and of ourselves and true to our experience of the world, and the hope of making something that will gratify our pleasure in shape and proportion, rhythm and sound, movement and pace.  (And perhaps, in some writers, pleasures, whether questionable or merely artful, of manipulating readers.)  When we as writers can trust not only reason but also an intuition that somehow is honest, then we can manage to hear as much as possible of what intuition is saying, since it has already spoken in our drafts.  Bollas writes that “the sense of intuition” leads us “to consciously authorize certain forms of investigation in thought which are not consciously logical but which may be unconsciously productive” (1994, 90).  What is the complex way of thinking that is writing fiction or poetry, if not precisely that?

The novelist Cyrus Colter (1910-2002) once told me a down-to earth version of all this.  Colter–whose family might have been the only blacks in the whole white country where Colter grew up in southern Indiana–moved to Chicago after college, put himself through law school by working as the night clerk at a YMCA on the South Side, practiced–as he said–any kind of law he could, and eventually achieved great professional distinction as a long-time member of the Illinois Commerce Commission.  Having been a tremendous reader of fiction all his life, he began to write when he was fifty.  He published his first book, the superb collection of short stories, The Beach Umbrella, at the age of sixty, and went on to write several novels, among which The Hippodrome is the most shocking and astonishing and A Chocolate Soldier is his masterwork of narration of the hard truths of race in America.

I first met him in 1984, when he was seventy-four years old.  His wife had died earlier that year, and the sorrow of that loss never left him afterward.  When I asked him, perhaps five years later, what his wife–who was, to judge from his descriptions of her, a more conventional person than he–had said about his books, he replied that he had never shown a new work to her until he had completed it, and then only with some trepidation.  Colter was tall, imperious, a talker with considerable momentum, so I was surprised at the caution with which he had gone to the now departed Imogene for her response to his writing.  Given the inescapably autobiographical dimension of everything we write–precisely in this sense of the unconscious that I am trying to describe, in that everything we write shows at some level what our obsessions and preoccupations are–I had been wondering how Colter had handled the sometimes ticklish problem of personal diplomacy between the writer and the members of his family.  He said that Imogene, having read the typescript, would return it to him and, if he had done what he hoped, she would say the one thing–he told me–that he most needed to hear, most needed to know, and which at the same time removed from her the burden of commenting in detail: “Cyrus,” she would say, “it’s you.”

That is to say that the novel, no matter what it described, conveyed (as she recognized, looking with her whole being, conscious and unconscious) his whole being (not only the lawyerly competence, propriety and combativeness by which others knew him, his affability or imperiousness with others, his literary ambitions).  He had the gift of knowing himself more fully than he might have been thought to know himself, even by close friends.  Without this, even with his late-blooming literary craft and his preparatory wide lifelong reading, his accomplishment would have been minor.  He used all of what he had.

While the lattermath harvest of grass is scanty, the aftermath of experience and feeling can be rich.  It is only afterward that we have enough to work with.  Wordsworth’s well-known phrase “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is accurate enough, if by “emotion” we understand every sort of feeling and thought, even–perhaps especially–the body’s sense of what it experiences: what it knows, what it remembers, beyond consciousness, and every such fleeting feeling and thought whether or not we have a name for it; and if by “recollected” we mean simply having been preserved within us in such a way as to remain available to us, in some form or other, whether we try to remember it and do, or it comes to consciousness without our trying to remember it at all, or it reveals itself to us only through an arduous and even traumatic process of self-inquiry; and by “in tranquillity” we mean at least sometime after the activity of body and mind that is experience itself.

But I must end with a reminder of the deep pleasure of writing.  It may not be the kind of pleasure that makes one smile.  It may be a pleasure that seems to satisfy us most when we are least on guard against our worst tendencies as writers (which vary, naturally enough, from writer to writer).  Pleasure it is, though.   Pleasure–however desperate, at moments, for reasons personal, psychological, artistic, or political–of catching hold of, or creating out of imagination, the language and the image for what we sense, see, know, and feel.

Here is a link to my interview with Theodore Weiss, which was published in American Poetry Review in the May/June issue of 2001.  Weiss was born in 1916 and died in 2003.  Ted, along with his wife Renée, edited the Quarterly Review of Literature for more than 50 years, carrying it from the 1940s, when there were very few literary magazines, through the great flowering of lit mags in the 1960s and 1970s, and into our own moment.  After Ted’s death, Renée ceased publication of the magazine and began work–in which she is still active–at filling in library collections that are missing volumes of the magazine in their collections.  Since there is no other American literary magazine that comes close to representing the literary history of the nation between the 1940s and the millenium, the QRL is a uniquely valuable element in any library collection.  Many extraordinary poets, fiction writers and other writers, and many extraordinary works, published by QRL during its long active span, are not represented in current anthologies, which typically are the manifestation of publishers’ marketing research or at least hunches than of attempts to a sense of what really did happen in American literary history.  Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, a poetry anthology that in breaking this rule reveals how pervasive it is, still shows us how much we are missing in our everyday sense of where American poetry has been.

When I became the editor of TriQuarterly magazine in 1981, it was the example of Ted and Renée that was uppermost in my mind, and stayed very much in mind till I left the editorship in 1997.

My interview with Ted Weiss was less about the magazine, though, than about his own writing and his sense of poetry in general.  He was one of the greatest talkers about poetry I have even encountered, especially in the 1990s when he had the longest view of it, looking back at his own work and the work of his contemporaries.  Among his own poems (which can be found in his Selected Poems (Northwestern University Pres, 1995), I especially recommend:

“The Dance Called David” (and see the special issue of QRL from the 1980s on the figure at the center of this poem, the remarkable poet David Schubert, who burned himself out in one way or another and died young)

“The Last Day and the First”

“The Heir Apparent”

“The Last Letters”

“Things of the Past”

“The Polish Question”

“A Living Room”

“The Death of Fathers”

Here’s the link (you may have to cut and paste it in your browser):

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200105/ai_n8945900

On Friday evening, April 3, the Chilean poet Raúl ZURITA, with his translator Daniel Borzutzky, gave a reading in Chicago.

Zurita and Borzutzky, both in excellent voice in an auditorium that seemed perfect for the event and with a very good audience, read from the original and Borzutzky’s translation of Zurita’s Canto a su amor desparecido, alternating short passages in Spanish and English.  Both poet and translator read with an intensity, clarity and rhythm of exchange back and forth that created a remarkable third thing between them, a kind of dialogue of Spanish and English ways of saying, in addition to the dialogue between the precise words of Zurita’s Spanish original and the very good translation.

The poem itself is a surreal translation into both possible and also impossible imagery of unspeakable and nearly unsayable experiences of imprisonment, torture and murder, of powerlessness and sorrow and spiritual destruction, yet also of enduring and holding onto one’s humanity, during the brazen dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet was the army general who, with secret encouragement and backing from the CIA, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, had already been hounding the socialist president, Salvador Allende, and mounted a coup in 1973, attacking with tanks and troops the Presidential Palace, where Allende and his staff had small arms.  Allende committed suicide in the building.  Thousands of persons died and suffered in the days and months and years following, as Pinochet directed a campaign of extralegal imprisonment, torture and execution.

In this Song of the Disappeared Love Zurita finds a way to write a dirge about such overwhelming experiences of violence and injustice.  He mixes some words referring to such realities with others that make of the experience a surreal composite of the real and the unreal, the symbolic and the fantastic.

Poetry is a very insubstantial form of resistance to injustice.  It restores no independence of the judiciary; it is no defense against state thugs at the door and in the street; it can create no systems of defense of persons against a police state.  And poetry has no inherent value: or rather, it carries within itself inherently the potential for the subtlest values of the possibilities of language, and for speaking the truth of human experience in memorable ways.  But after all, the Confederate States of America had patriotic poets, as did Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain.  Yet as in samizdat circulation in Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, when poets write of humane values, when the very act of continuing to write and read poetry–as dictatorship enforces submission and generates hopelessness–is itself a preservation of something humane among darker human possibilities.  At such moments, poetry can serve as a deep restitution and preservation of honorable ideals and of language itself in the midst of the systematic destruction of these by dictatorship whether of the right or left.

I think that this kind of inspiring feat, from Zurita’s 1980s, is what moved the audience as Zurita, assisted by Borzutsky, gave voice to his poetry.

After the reading, Zurita answered questions from the audience, with Borzutzky serving as live translator back and forth for Zurita or the audience as questioners spoke in both Spanish and English.

Brief biographies of poet and translator had been provided on line by the sponsor of the event, The Guild Complex, a  literary center with small footprint and great perseverance (on whose board I have served since it was founded in 1989).  This event was part of an ongoing series of bilingual English/Spanish poetry readings in the Guild Complex series “Palabra Pura,” founded by Mike Puican.  And the welcome and introductions Friday night were given by Ellen Wadey, the Executive Director of the Guild Complex.  Here are the biographical notes:

Raul Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1951. He started out studying mathematics before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. In the early 80’s, Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, “The New Life,” over Manhattan and later (still during the reign of Pinochet) he bulldozed the phrase “Ni Pena Ni Miedo” (”Without Pain Or Fear”) into the Atacama Desert, where it can still be seen because children in the neighboring town bring shovels into the desert and turn over the sand in the letters. For fifteen years, Zurita worked on a trilogy which is considered one of the signal poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory appeared in 1979, Ante-paradise in 1982, and The New Life in 1993. Raul Zurita is one of the most renowned contemporary Latin American poets, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. Translations of Purgatory and Anteparadise were published in the United States in the 80’s. Three new books, INRI, translated by William Rowe; Song of the Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky; and Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny; are forthcoming from, respectively, Merick Press, Action Books, and The University of California Press.  Zurita’s books of poems include, among others: El Sermon de la Montana; Areas Verdes; Purgatorio; Anteparadiso; El Paraiso Esta Vacio – Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, La Vida Nueva, In Memoriam

Daniel Borzutzky’s books include The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007), Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005), and the chapbooks One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull Press, 2007). Daniel’s family comes from Chile, and his translation work has focused on Chilean writers. He is the translator of, among other works, Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita (Forthcoming, Action Books); Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenún (Action Books, 2008); and One Year and other stories by Juan Emar, which was published as a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Daniel’s writings and translations have appeared in dozens of print and online journals. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the English Department at Wright College.

Unconscious Deliberateness (part 1)

When we work as writers in a state of openness of imagination, when we are responsive enough to allow what we see, both outside and within ourselves, to evoke feeling in us, and when we seek to discover within ourselves–beyond anxiety, trauma, enthusiasm, intense feelings of other kinds, and the sheer bafflement of writing, itself–what we had not known we knew or felt, then we are able to use more of the guiding power of our own unconscious to encounter both the world and ourselves.  We are able to discover more than we could using only our conscious minds.  And when we work that way we also are able to create poetry and fiction that is more deliberately woven together, making choices that are more artistically deliberate and meaningful rather than somewhat haphazard or by writers’ rules of thumb.  The pleasures of weaving that we feel when we work are then felt by the good reader.

Anyway, to think that we are working without the active participation of our unconscious is folly–no one is able with only conscious intent to produce great writing.  There is too much to manage, especially in longer works, and every power of intuition is necessary if we are to succeed. Not only that, but the conscious mind is unable to block out unconscious content, so it is going into what we write whether we know it or not.  So the question becomes, How do I use my own individual intuition, my range of responsiveness, my unconscious choices?  And what can I achieve if I try to do this?

Here is one illustration of supreme emotional depth and supreme craft united in a paragraph of prose.  The English title of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu is a Shakespearean phrase, Remembrance of Things Past (from sonnet XXX).  But properly translated into English the title would have been something as straightforward as “in search of lost times.”  Lost times exist only in our psyche, and this recherche, this search, by the way, is also our re-searching as writers–that is, our moving over the field after the harvest, searching once more, this time not for what was already harvested but for what has come back again and for what was left behind.

At the beginning of Proust’s first volume, called in English Swann’s Way, the first episode is a very prolonged account, astonishing in many ways, of an evening in the narrator’s childhood when his habitual emotional need for, his dependance on, a goodnight kiss every night from his young, beautiful mother, was thwarted by the presence of a dinner guest, M. Swann.  Events and characters are described with extraordinary richness of detail and symbol and psychological insight, and the plot advances only very slowly, as the narrator recalls his strategems for getting that kiss, on that evening both remembered and imagined, despite the intrusive presence of the guest, despite his mother’s reluctance to indulge him, and despite his father’s intolerance for the boy’s life of feeling and his neediness.  The parents finally come upstairs–mother first, whom the boy ambushes with his pleas, followed by father, holding a candle.  And the boy bursts into tears.

This is the crucial, initiating moment of the whole three thousand pages of Proust’s multi-volume novel.  Something is established in this experience of thwarted hope and desire, and then in the sudden and unexpected rewarding of this hope and desire, that sets the course of the whole work. Helene Cixous, the French writer and thinker, points out that in this scene the rewarding of desire leads not to triumph but to an unanticipated feeling of loss, because in finally being awarded, by the father, the presence of his mother, the boy gets her only against her will, and thus he defeats the one person whose love he needed to receive without asking for it.  In the reflective passage that follows this scene, this contradiction in feeling is drawn out by the narrator, and Cixous has also drawn our attention to the culminating poetic figure here–the moment in which child, father and mother are configured in a tableau which establishes the tears of the child not only in that moment but for the rest of his life.  Clearly these pages of Proust are richly woven with the most complicated feelings in the characters, at all levels of their psyches.  I want to point to a little technical effect in the same passage.

I translate Proust’s sentences pretty literally, and not very idiomatically in English, for a reason I’ll get to in a moment (and perhaps readers with even a little French, having first scanned this translation, will be able to follow Proust’s original text, which I will put afterwards):

It has been a good many years since all that.  The stairway wall, where I saw the reflection of his candle come rising, does not exist, since long ago.  In me also a good number of things have been destroyed that I believed ought to last forever, and new things are built which gave birth to new pain and joy which I would not have been able to foresee, before, just as much as the old ones became difficult for me to understand.  It has been a good long time also since my father stopped being able to say to mother, “Go along with the little one.”  The possibility of those hours will never be reborn, for me.  But after a while, I begin again to perceive, if I give a good ear to them, the sobs which I had the strength to contain before my father and which did not burst forth except when I found myself alone with mother.  In reality they never did stop; it’s only because life hushes now all around me that I hear them again, like those convent bells that the noises of the town cover so well during the day that one believed them stopped, but which sound out again in the silence of the night.

Il y a bien des années de cela.  La muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps.  En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours et de nouvelles se sont édifiées donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n’aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.  Il y a bien longtemps aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: «Va avec le petit.»  La possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi.  Mais depuis peu de temps, je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvai seul avec maman.  En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arrêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.  (Du côté de chez Swann: Combray)

We see the emotional trauma behind this narrative moment.  My sense of this passage is the following: the adult narrator is struck by what he sees within himself, by his in-sight–as he looks within; or is within and looks around him, there.  At this moment of perceiving what he has already described, of extending the consciousness of narration to the consciousness of aftermath, he understands that like the silence of convent (not church!) bells that is only apparent, not real, because they are drowned out by daytime noise, the long-ago sobbing of his childhood, which he had unspoken permission to release only in the presence of his mother, never did stop. but has only been drowned out by the noise of later, adult life, by his own later history both inner and social.  This already mown field, we enter by night.  And by night the movement, the insight, the discoveries, the knowledge, of the unconscious is as vivid as the watchfulness of the conscious mind by day.  By night, literally–in that in dreams and in the transition from sleep to waking and waking to sleep the unconscious speaks most clearly to the conscious mind–and by night, metaphorically, in that, at whatever hour we write, when we draw on the unconscious we make a kind of night of the day.

*

The reason for my wanting to provide a more or less word-for-word translation of the French is to create a reiteration in English of the adjective “good,” which is the best I can do, to match the French adverb “bien,” which because of the necessities of English-language syntax I am having to translate colloquially and awkwardly.  I want to do this so that we can perceive in English not only that the narrator’s sobs are like the nighttime ringing of the convent bells (and vice versa),  but also that he himself as writer rings these bells in his sentences by using the word “bien” five times.  In the passages before and after this one, the word appears only once or twice over a few hundred words–that is, at a more expected frequency.  And I would have liked in the last sentence of the translation to have echoed the narrator’s last use of “bien” with the English “good,” although it would have required me to distort the syntax into something like “the convent bells are good-and-covered by the noises of the town.”  But we’ll leave the problems translation as a topic for some other occasion!

My describing an aspect of craft so unmistakable, which yet seems too subtle to have been deliberately calculated, is for the purpose of giving an example of the working of unconscious deliberateness.  I don’t assume that Proust inserted those repetitions of “bien” consciously, but that he did so with unconscious deliberateness.  Proust’s passage exemplifies a synthesizing power which, at least in his case, directs every aspect of craft toward the one goal of the emotional and rhetorical richness of the portrayal of one moment of feeling.

(Someone will object: How do you know Proust didn’t set up that ringing bell of the word “bien” deliberately.  My answer: Yes, it is most certainly deliberate; there is no other way to account for its aptness and meaningfulness–yet conscious deliberateness alone can never create all the effects one finds in such a paragraph, much less in a whole page, a whole chapter, a whole novel.  There is simply too much to do.  One can’t do it with conscious deliberateness any more than a musician can play a difficult work in the key of B while having to consciously remember that the B scale includes D-sharp.  Nor does the musician need to remember that.  That knowledge, along with knowledge of phrasing, dynamics, and so on–and like Proust’s knowledge of syntax, image, and so on–has been absorbed into the highly trained musicianship that is required of a serious musician–like Proust’s highly trained…  what?  We don’t seem to have a word for what, in the writer, corresponds to “musicianship.”)

Since I am not gifted with Proust’s extraordinary powers of concentration and synthesis, then one of my tasks is to discover how as a writer I can at least bring certain aspects of this unconscious deliberateness to consciousness, so that I can discover on the field of my own experience the hints and clues of my unconsciousness feeling.  So I can glean those hints and clues from what my unconscious has left on the pages of my draft, and let them seize my conscious attention.  Just as the mouse, which anyone else might never have even noticed, or if noticing, might never have pondered, becomes for John Clare the object that, once acknowledged, releases his feeling.

In a pentameter line, Derek Walcott writes in “Midsummer XIV”: “There’s childhood, and there’s childhood’s aftermath.”

We do not write of childhood when we are children.  As writers, we always begin in aftermath.  The “math” in “aftermath” is an Old English word for mowing–that is, the aftermath is the second mowing, “a second crop of grass in the same season” (American Heritage Dictionary).  The Oxford English Dictionary records that in the 16th century, it was also called in dialect the “lattermath,” the later mowing.  We return to the harvest field, after the harvest, after labor, after experience, and there we find a second crop of grass in the same season.  This is the crop that we harvest.  And perhaps we also find a space haunted by all the human labor that was invested in plowing, planting, tending, and the first harvest.  [Keats' "To Autumn"--haunted by what he has excluded.]

In that the “math” in “aftermath” is also a kind of equation, we hear the mere chance of word history.  We always begin by searching for a kind of equation that will represent what happened during the harvest.  Therefore when we write poetry and fiction we are writing in a peculiarly compressed way–no matter how lengthy the work in progress, for the compression is not in length but in the mental process by which we move from image to image, from feeling to feeling, from scene to scene.

We do not explain everything.  We arrange symbols to say what can be said in no other way, and our arrangements of symbols are in turn larger symbols.

In another mood, “aftermath” has the connotation of something unpleasant.  Perhaps this came from the difference between the scantiness of the second harvest compared to the first.  The Oxford English Dictionary quotes this 1834 sentence by the Romantic poet Robert Southey: “No aftermath has the fragrance and the sweetness of the first crop.”  Our first harvest is living and thinking and feeling, according to our chances and our temperaments, while our second harvest, as writers, is something that we take from the field that grew back again, in part, a little while later–the field that tried to remember itself after the mowing men had passed swinging their scythes.  The first harvest is the sustenance, the living; the after-harvest, we weave into some shape, some little straw doll that stands for what happened, or what might have happened or what might happen.

In the aftermath, we remember some of what we saw, and we look around in search of  reminders–we don’t know what they will be–of what we have already forgotten that we saw.  This looking around can find its reward in unexpected places–perhaps in the street as we walk; perhaps in a book that we are reading; perhaps in our reverie or dreams.  We poke about.  In the language of the English poet John Clare, we “prog.”   His untitled poem set after haying time, now called “The Mouse’s Nest,” written sometime between 1832 and 1837, portrays a moment of looking for nothing in particular, but looking, while wandering through the already mown fields, and finding something:

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away                 [progged = prodded]
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned agen and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats[.]
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood[.]
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked[,] and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay[.]
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun

[According to the OED, “craking” would mean making a harsh cry; some editors have “squeaking” and others “crawling”; Again, the OED says that cesspools = a dug pit for catching sediment for a stream, or refuse from waste water.[

He does not analyze what he finds, but follows his feeling into a new moment.  His feeling does not need any comment.  Whereas most of the time, as Dickinson writes, “‘Tis many a tiny Mill / Turns unperceived beneath our feet” (Johnson 1097; Franklin 1102), Clare’s tiny mouse has unfettered the whole world, in his spirit.

Reading Clare’s poem, which was written amidst the drastic social change and suffering caused by the private appropriation of public lands and the resulting displacement and impoverishment of poor laborers, I cannot help feeling that in the utter otherness of the mouse, he saw himself.  Like the mouse, he had many children to support by his physical labor, since he could not do so by his verses.  And perhaps he felt he himself was considered “odd and grotesque.”  Certainly he was pained in his awareness of being different from those among whom he lived–Clare was unlike other farm laborers in being a poet, and in being a farm laborer, he was very unlike other poets.  Of all the little things he sees while meandering through the field in a thoughtful mood, it is the peculiar overburdened mouse which in some way he in particular is predisposed to notice.  Noticing it–merely seeing it–he has accomplished the work that his imagination was ready to do, and this accomplishment makes him feel exalted.  The world appears to him in a different way.  He has been given, or rather he has given himself, an intensely awake moment simply because the vague and unconscious availability of his feeling, of his mind, has found that which it was available for–the symbol of his feeling, rather than the analysis of it or the naming of it.

Since we writers begin in aftermath, we might look carefully over the mown field for whatever we may happen to notice, and we might listen for any echo of what was said when the field was filled with men and women and children laboring.  We will see something, and hear something, even if what is there is mostly nothing and silence.  We listen for what others heard, and also for what was not heard by anyone–what we ourselves did not hear, or once heard and then could no longer hear until in the aftermath we listened once more.  And when suddenly we see our own mouse, and perceive it fully, we are taken by a feeling of exaltation because we gain access to another world inside the world.  Even muddy rain puddles then glitter in the sun.  Clare’s responsiveness to what he sees, this seeing of that to which he is responsive, this acknowledging of his own response, is who Clare is; and in finishing the poem, he has brought himself into the truth of his being.